Mythology Abroad Read online

While they ate, Keith talked. He could see that his friend was still anxious, but he was negotiating the jet’s aisles without lurching, and he handled the air turbulence over Nova Scotia without comment or color changes. So what was bugging him? He looked haggard, more tired than he had ever seen him. Something wrong in the village? Or something more personal? “I’m really looking forward to exploring Scotland, aren’t you?” Keith babbled. “I can’t rent a car ’til I’m 25, so that’s out, but there are buses, and we can get bicycles. Can you ride a bike? I’m especially anxious to see the standing stones at Callanish. It’s supposed to be Scotland’s answer to Stonehenge—you know, really magical.”

  No response. “The Hebrides are so far distant from everything, that they haven’t been spoiled by development yet. The syllabus said there are five dig sites currently under investigation, though we won’t know which one we work on until we get there. I’ve got lots of books with me about the area, and the local legends. Of course, all of them are about half read. But I expect to have them all finished by the time I go home. We travel to the islands by ferryboat, you know, same as when we leave for Ireland. No more flying.”

  Holl, made more comfortable by food, and the fact that night had fallen, obscuring the view from 37,000 feet up over open water, shook his head wryly. If he couldn’t trust Keith Doyle, whom could he trust? Besides, he needed the boy’s help. “You’ve worn me out, widdy. I’ll confess. I’ve been through a trauma the likes of which I never want to repeat in my lifetime. It’s well that you’ve provided an opportunity for me to remove myself from the situation for a while. I just asked the Master for permission to marry his daughter, and you can imagine what that was like.”

  “Holy cow!” exclaimed Keith, sympathetically regarding Holl. “You’ve still got all your hide, though. I take it he said yes? Congratulations! When’s the wedding?”

  “Maura still has yet to be asked, foolish one. But that’s not all we discussed, hence my departure with you to discover our original home.” Holl sighed. More and more in the recent past, he and the Master had butted heads over issues, and Holl had come in second each time. Experience and logic won over youthful energy and good intentions over and over again. “There’s the welfare of the other Folk to be considered. Did you know there hasn’t been a wedding since we came to Midwestern, more than four decades gone?”

  “Really? Wow! So you’ll be the first. Great. When are you going to ask her? Can I come to the wedding?”

  “If. If I can. There’s something I need to find before I do.”

  “In Ireland? What? The Ring of Kerry? A four-leaf clover?” Keith laughed.

  Holl glowered. “Your interminable questions, Keith Doyle! I almost wish I’d not told you. We’ve always had the custom that a wedding couple wears white bellflowers. No one has married since we came to Midwestern. We’ll be the first in a string of decades. It sounds squashy and sentimental when I think about it, but there you are. But no white bellflowers survive among our plants. My mother’s sister was in charge of propagating of all the seeds our folk would need, but that one slipped by, whether dying off infertile or simply being left behind in the old place, she can’t say, it’s been that long. Many of the kernels and seeds she’s preserved have never been grown, since the bottom of the library building is no fit place for them. And there’s been no need for the flower in all this time, so it wasn’t missed.”

  “That vital to the process, eh?” Keith asked.

  “We’ve never done without it. They’re imbued with a charm of joining, among a host of other useful natural properties, good for healing wounds or curing the tongue-tied.”

  “Yes,” Keith nodded solemnly. “I can see where you’d want to be holding one of those before you propose.”

  Holl ignored the jibe. “Of course, this is all before my time. I’ve not witnessed a wedding myself. But I have a feeling that many of my generation have only been waiting to pick white bellflowers to ask their loved ones to marry.”

  “And the Master made it one of the conditions of his approval, didn’t he?” Keith asked shrewdly, and was rewarded by an expression of summing respect on his companion’s face. “Well, you did say it was for the welfare of everyone else, too. What do they look like? There’s a lot of different kinds of bell-shaped flowers in the world. Lily-of-the-valley, bluebells, foxglove, you name it.”

  “I’ll know them when I see them,” Holl said uneasily. “They probably are similar to any of the other campanulaceae.”

  “So where do you find them?”

  “I don’t know, exactly, but the Master felt I should look in the old places from where our folk come. They might be in fairy rings, well-guarded earth mounds in hidden places, and the like.”

  “I suppose you know it’s illegal to carry plants back into the U.S. without a license?” Keith asked. Holl nodded. “Well, I don’t know that magic flowers count. Now that we’ve cleared that out of the way, let’s open the atlas and find our most likely prospects.”

  Holl and Keith discussed the subject well into the night, until the in-flight movie was announced. At the stewardess’s request, the lights were shut off and the window shades pulled down. The movie played on an easel-sized screen at the front of the section. Through his rented headphones, Holl listened to the tinny soundtrack, and relaxed back into his nest of pillows. It wasn’t half bad, really, watching a film this way. There were no extraneous noises to distract one from the program, barring the constant atonal whistle from the air system. He glanced over to ask Keith Doyle a question, and saw that the boy had fallen asleep, head back and jaw open, in his corner of the row. Holl grinned at him paternally. The lad had been so intent on making sure he, Holl, was comfortable that he wore himself out. Gently, Holl eased the headset off Keith’s ears and hooked it on the cloth pocket of the seat in front of him.

  The Big Folk took their technology so much for granted, they didn’t realize how much of a miracle it would seem to someone else, Holl thought. If it wasn’t magic to fly through the thin, high air, in relative comfort with hot food and entertainment, then it was a near cousin, and it took not a whit of energy out of one’s own aura to be a part of these marvels. Holl could feel the threatening presence of too much metal under and around him, though it was unlikely to break through the protective cloth and plastic coats in which the Big Folk clad it to attack him.

  It did indeed make him nervous to be surrounded by so many strange Big Folk. He realized how sheltered he had been all his life, coming into contact only with the few who could be trusted. He had to keep reminding himself that no one knew him, and that none would observe that for which they weren’t looking. Trying to put that thought from him, he reminded himself he was on a mission of great importance. Strange as it may sound, he couldn’t be in better hands than those of Keith Doyle. If something came too close to him, Keith would draw away attention and make a joke out of it. There was surprising safety in humor. Holl took off the baseball cap and ruffled his hair with his fingers with a sigh of relief. No need to put it back on until the lights came up again. Now was his chance to do something about the uncomfortable seat. He unbuckled his belt and scooted forward off the pad. A searching tendril of knowledge he put into the cushions suggested that there was just enough fiber to be comfortable, but it had been flattened down by who knew how many bottoms before his. He forced them to repel from one another, springing out against their covering, puffing the cushions up from within. The charge abated swiftly, for the fibers were poor conductors, and Holl was able to settle back in the seat without feeling the bars and rods poking at him anymore.

  The film’s plot was predictable, one of the nine plots repeated over and over throughout five thousand years of literature and ninety of filmmaking, so Holl’s attention wandered. Looking around at his fellow passengers to ensure he was disturbing no one, he reached across Keith, slid up the shade and looked out of the window at the night.

  He had heard of all sorts of terrible accidents in planes, owing to bad mainte
nance or fatigued metal. Holl preferred to live long enough to see the far lands on the other side of the ocean, and return home again. There was so much that was precious to him, only the thought that he would return allowed him to wrench himself away. Feeling outward gently with a cohesion spell, he touched the braces and bulkheads of the giant airliner, seeking weak spots and untightened bolts. The jet’s complexity of construction amazed him. Not surprisingly, the massed metal repelled his touch, but reassuringly sent back impressions that it was solid and whole, needing none of his magic to finish its journey in safety. Holl relaxed, satisfied. This jet was well built and correctly maintained. As a craftsman, he approved such work.

  The stars were remarkably clear up here. The disturbing sight of the far-distant surface was covered by a soft carpet of white clouds, ghostly fleece under the moon. Holl spotted constellations and counted stars until he fell asleep with his face toward the moon.

  ***

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Good morning!” The sheer power of the loudspeaker over their heads belied the flight attendant’s friendly greeting. “We will be landing in just about an hour, so we’ll be serving breakfast and distributing landing cards now. Please have them with you when you pass through Customs.”

  Holl woke up like a shot at the first blast of sound. “They dole out sleep in grudging amounts, don’t they?” he asked grumpily, planting his cap on top of his disordered hair. Keith had been curled up like a grasshopper with his thin knees against his chest until the flight attendant’s voice shocked him awake. Both legs shot out and banged into the seat in front of him, earning a sleepy grunt from its occupant. “Sorry,” Keith murmured. He focused his reddened eyes on his friend and ran his hands through tousled hair.

  “Good morning,” Holl said politely.

  “I guess they don’t want us to get too comfortable.” Keith noticed the glare of the sun coming over his shoulder. “Sounds like we crashed straight into tomorrow. Oops, I must have nudged the shade open while I was asleep. Sorry.” He glanced down at the shimmering gray sea far below them, visible through thinning white clouds.

  “Don’t bother,” Holl said, catching his hand. “I don’t mind any more. It doesn’t look real up this high. There, I see coastline, clear as I can see you. Which is it? Can we open up your maps?”

  Breakfast was a basket containing a cold, sweet pastry, fruit cocktail, and a sealed cup of orange juice, and accompanied by a white document identified by the flight attendant as a landing card, which all non-United Kingdom residents needed to fill out. Holl tasted a single bite of the pastry and rejected it, as he read the card.

  “Newsprint mixed with sugar, and topped with more,” he complained. The fruit was pronounced edible, but the orange juice proved to be as difficult to open as the peanuts. “They must have an endless supply of that plastic.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Keith. “I have emergency rations in my bag. Cookies, candy bars, and sandwiches. Do you want peanut butter and jelly, or ham, tomato, and mustard?”

  “I apologize, Keith Doyle, for all the bleating,” Holl admitted, shamefacedly accepting a sandwich. “Grousing about such trifles as food, when I’ve just flown three thousand miles and more. A wonder, and I’m not even properly grateful. Your pardon.”

  “I promise, I would never have assumed you were scared out of your skull,” Keith replied, very solemnly, but his eyes twinkled. “If I didn’t know better, I would have put it down to that.”

  Holl laughed. “That’s the truth of it. I don’t react well in crisis, do I?”

  “Lack of experience. You’re much better on your home ground,” Keith reasoned. “Why not let yourself go, and take the adventure as it comes? The food wasn’t poisoned or anything, just not that good. I prefer home cooking myself.” Keith, who prided himself that he could eat anything, had finished both their pastries and a sandwich, and was rolling down the wrapper on a candy bar. “It’s a whole new experience for me, too, traveling to another country. At least this one speaks the same language I do.”

  A flight attendant appeared beside them to take away their trays. “Well, how are we this morning?” she asked brightly. Her swept-back brown hair looked freshly coifed, and her makeup had been newly applied.

  “Better,” Keith smiled up at her, wondering how she looked so good when he felt so lousy. Maybe their seats were more comfortable.

  “Good! The captain would like your little brother to have his wings, for completing his first flight across the Atlantic.” The woman handed Holl a small card to which was pinned a pot-metal representation of pilot’s insignia. “Thank you for flying with us, young man. We hope you’ve enjoyed yourself.” Holl stared at the card and then up at the woman with disbelief in his eyes.

  “Say thank you,” Keith urged him, with an elbow in the ribs.

  “Thank you,” Holl gritted out. “I suppose I deserve a medal for living through this,” he said under his breath as the flight attendant walked away.

  “Don’t hate it too much,” Keith cautioned him. “We have to do it all over again on the way home.”

  Within the hour, the plane touched down, and the passengers debarked into Glasgow Airport. In the midst of the milling crowd, Keith and Holl followed the signs for Customs. The longest line in the Customs hall proved to be that for U.S. and Canadian citizens. “It’s tourist season,” Keith reasoned, glancing covertly at the loud, obscene, or torn tee shirts in which his countrymen were clad. He winced, and then wondered if he would be considered overdressed in his short-sleeved button-down shirt. It was close in the hall. The heat was not as much a problem as the humidity, which made breathing a task in the stagnant air, especially for travelers short of sleep. They shuffled back and forth in the serpentine queue, which was bounded by colored ropes and bronze posts. “I feel like I’m on Mulholland Drive in the middle of an L.A. summer.”

  “No air conditioning,” Holl observed. “When it’s there, you complain of it. When you don’t have it, you miss it.”

  “Passports?” said the man behind the narrow desk, with little to no inflection in his voice. Obediently, Keith and Holl handed over their dark blue booklets and white landing cards. “Business or playsure?” The final r rolled off his tongue in a rumbling burr.

  His was the first real Scottish accent they had heard, and Keith’s ears perked up. “Uh, we’re here to join a university class,” he explained, hoping the man would say something else.

  The deeply etched mouth lifted slightly in one corner, and the dark eyes twinkled. Keith saw that they were actually dark blue. “Taychnically, that’d be playsure, do you no’ agree; still it might be a bit o’ a job?” Keith absorbed the tones with avidity, and nodded. The man stamped their passports with a square and a line of print and waved them on to the baggage hall.

  “Whew! Did you hear him? Great!”

  “Fascinating,” Holl agreed. “He sounds like and not like Curran, the chief of my clan. Are we that close to Ireland?”

  “We’re separated from it only by a narrow sea and a sense of direction. Remember King James the Sixth and all. Hey, come on. Our bags won’t be on the baggage carousel yet. I want to call home.”

  There was a money-exchange inside the baggage hall which took Keith’s traveler’s checks and provided him with a receipt and a handful of very colorful paper money and coins of several sizes and shapes.

  “Uh-oh, I hope the phone doesn’t just take … what is this?—” he wondered, examining a small silver coin with seven sides, “—twenty pences.”

  Holl looked through the collection of cash with fascination. “They’re all different, and graduated in size by value, I see. Would you mind lending me a bit of that for the duration of the journey, Keith Doyle?”

  “Sure—Whoa! Didn’t you bring any money with you?” Keith asked, aghast. He experienced a moment of panic, calculating his meager supply of liquid cash, and dividing by two. It wasn’t a comforting total. “Who the heck travels without spending money?”

  �
�And how should I know, when I’ve never been ten miles from my home in my life?” Holl defended himself, and produced his wallet, which he thrust at Keith. “You should have warned me, Keith Doyle. All I’ve got with me is this.”

  Keith counted the money in the leather folder and sighed with relief. “Holl, they’ll take hundred-dollar bills, I promise.”

  “I don’t need the blue money?” Holl asked meekly.

  “Nope. Those are traveler’s checks, which I bought at home for green money. The exchange rate’s a little lower for cash. I might even ask you for a loan later on. I don’t have anywhere near seven hundred bucks on me.”

  Returning from the exchange desk with a fascinating handful of British money, Holl found Keith reading the instructions on long cards surrounding the pay telephone.

  “Piece of cake,” the young man called, as the elf caught his eye. “It takes all the coins.” Keith fed in the change, punched in the International Access Code, 1, then his home phone number. “It’s ringing … Hi, Dad. Yeah, we’re here. The flight was fine. I’m on a pay phone, and it’s ticking off the money pretty fast. I’ll call again in two days. Give my love to Mom. Sure I’ll send postcards! Bye!” He punched a square blue button under the hook marked ‘Follow On Call,’ and dialed again. “Whew! The sign says that’s what you’re supposed to do to keep from losing your change. Dad says hi, and hopes you’re okay. Diane? Good morning!”

  “Keith?” Diane muttered sleepily into the receiver. “Hi. I’m not up yet. Can you call later?”

  “Whaddaya mean you’re not out of bed yet?” the cheerful voice demanded. “It must be four in the morning!”

  O O O

  Her eyes flew open. “Are you guys okay? How’s Scotland?” Diane asked anxiously. Unable to restrain a yawn, she covered the receiver with the other hand, and gaped at the clock. She peered out of her apartment window at a gray false-dawn, and groaned.

  “Haven’t seen it yet. We’re still waiting for our suitcases. Say, can you let them know on the farm that Holl is okay?”